The Helium Murder(31)

“Let’s talk about it tomorrow,” I said. “I’m not even sure you’re all right to drive home. You’re both exhausted and the streets are still icy.”

“Robert’s going to drive us. But I guess you’re right. We’d better go down and gather our things.”

I walked my friends to the door and let them out, disappointed on many counts—I had nothing new to think about, no company for the rest of the evening, and no fun conversation about Saturday’s plans.

As I cleared the glasses and napkins, I noticed that Frank had left his jacket on my chair. I was considering whether to race downstairs with it, when I heard a knock.

I picked up the jacket and opened the door.

Rocky Busso was standing on my threshold.





Chapter Thirteen

I felt my heart beating against my throat, and my knees went weak. I squinted, opened my mouth, and tilted my head to the side, as if I’d just seen an unexpected glitch in a curve on my oscilloscope.

“Dr. Lamerino,” Rocky said, bowing slightly from the waist. “Can I come in?”

He held his hat in his hands in front of him, giving him a meek and humble look. Either that, or he was hiding his gun, I thought. The moment was like a dream—in my mind I reacted quickly, slamming the door in his face before he could move a muscle, but my body was absolutely rigid, my arms stiff as meter sticks.

If Rocky sensed my fear, he gave no indication. He might have been a Boy Scout selling cookies, or whatever little male scouts did for a living.

I stepped aside, taking a few steps backward into my living room, under the spell of my own panic. Rocky entered my apartment and walked past me, as far as my couch. He’d switched his hat to one hand and I saw that there was no gun, at least none aimed at me. So far, he’d said only six words, but his presence was overwhelming. His enormous bulk, spread mostly in the horizontal direction, seemed to raise the temperature of my apartment, and his sharp-smelling cologne saturated my nostrils.

Rocky was standing between me and my window, and I couldn’t figure out how to get past him to where I could see if the cruiser was still parked on Tuttle Street. Another thing that worried me was that the Christmas disc had ended, leaving me very vulnerable.

With the speed of a Pentium processor, I raced through the pros and cons of my options. Number one, run out the door and down the steps—useless if he had a gun, or a backup team waiting on the landing. Number two, scream at the top of my lungs—futile if no one was in the building, and probably aggravating to Rocky. I didn’t want to aggravate Rocky. Number three, attack Rocky—and bounce back from the shiny buttons of his expensive-looking black wool coat.

During this lightning-speed calculation, my body had remained essentially immobile, and in the end, I did what I always do. I chose the intellectual approach.

“How do you know me?” I asked, as evenly as I could, finally articulating the question that had been in the back of my mind all day.

“You’re Al Gravese’s girlfriend,” Rocky said, answering the wrong question.

“Did you know Al?” I asked.

“I worked for Al. I was just a kid,” he said, smoothing down his ample head of black-and-gray hair.

In spite of his heavyweight physique, Rocky’s manner was so gentle that I almost offered to take his coat and invite him to sit down. “Did you like your job?” I might ask, over an espresso.

“What can I do for you?” was what I actually asked, as if I were in charge.

“We know you’re digging into Al’s accident. Don’t do that.”

“How ... ?”

“We knew you was back in town,” Rocky said, not disappointing me with his grammatical deviations. “We always thought you was too smart for Al.” At this, Rocky chuckled and bowed from the waist again. “And now you’re a doctor.”

I figured Rocky thought “doctor” meant I could fix broken bones, and I hoped he hadn’t come to recruit me. Although he’d given me no cause for alarm, I stayed in my no-risk, no-tricky-questions mode.

“I don’t think I’ve ever met you,” I said.

“We kept to ourselves,” he said. “I came to tell you there’s no way to track down thirty-four-year-old business. They’re almost all dead now. And all you need to know is Al did a little too much drinking that night and he went off the road.”

“Who—?”

Rocky interrupted again, and I was starting to resent my one-syllable allotment.

“Al was crazy about you,” he said. “Before he left the club that night, he gave me an errand to do.” Rocky reached into his pocket, causing an involuntary gasp to leave my throat. To my great relief, he pulled out an item too small to be a weapon, and handed it to me—a small red velvet box, discolored and worn with age. “I picked this up for him at that jeweler’s on Broadway.”